The U.S. Army’s simulation and training executive office, PEO STRI, is seeking bids to recompete two of its largest and most important simulation systems, SE Core and OneSAF.

Orlando, Fla.-based PEO STRI is expected to issue requests for proposals (RFP) for both competitions in June. Major industry players are likely to fight fiercely for the new deals, which will place the winning contractors at the heart of all of the Army’s training systems. The recompetes will also result in a restructuring of the SE Core and OneSAF programs.

SE Core, or Synthetic Environment Core, aims to ensure that the Army’s virtual systems are fully integrated and compatible with live and constructive training systems. Under the current contract, CAE USA is responsible for SE Core’s visualization and database component, the Database Virtual Environment Development (DVED), while SAIC is responsible for SE Core architecture and integration (A&I).

Under this first recompete for SE Core, those two programs will be consolidated into one contract. The computer-generated Semi-Automated Forces (SAF) part of the current A&I program will be transferred to the new OneSAF program.

Similarly, the OneSAF program will also be streamlined. Five current OneSAF programs will be consolidated into two new contracts, one for OneSAF’s integration, interoperability and support, and the other for OneSAF production.

SAIC and Northrop Grumman Information Systems are among the current OneSAF providers.

PEO STRI spokeswoman Kristen McCullough said industry will be briefed on the RFPs at PEO STRI’s training and simulation industry symposium in Orlando on June 10. “We expect huge interest,” McCullough said.

Although details will not be revealed until the RFPs’ release in June, it is believed that the SE Core program could be worth around $380 million and the OneSAF contracts could total about $111 million — $69 million for OneSAF production and $42 million for the integration and support. All new contracts will cover multiple years, most probably a five-year period.

DVED, which will remain the centerpiece of the new single SE Core contract, develops tools and processes to create a nonproprietary, open-format master database for synthetic environments regardless of which image generator is used. The Army wants ultimately to establish database production centers around the world that will create correlated, runtime databases for virtual simulators.

Dynamic environment

At the ITEC conference and exhibition in London in May, CAE demonstrated an internal research and development effort it has been working on and which could have relevance to SE Core, where there is a requirement for the capability to do dynamic changes to terrain and buildings in real time anywhere in the word and without prior knowledge of those changes. For example, if a bomb hits a road and creates a crater, it would be ideal for mission rehearsal purposes if the database providing information to simulator image generators about that road automatically and instantly updated and showed the crater in the real-time visual system.

“We want to make our external environment react to things environmentally,” said Dave Graham, CAE director, technology application.

The company has therefore created a component it calls a dynamic terrain generator that introduces a common runtime format to replace conventional database static systems that publish offline and which take time for everything to correlate with the visuals, sensors and computer-generated forces.

“This is not a special effect,” Graham said of the demonstration the company presented at the show, in which a bomb blasted a hole in a road in Savannah, Ga., and it took about eight seconds for the database to update and show the damaged road. “Eight seconds is still too long, and we believe it needs to be faster and that we can do it in about 1½ seconds,” Graham said.

The ultimate goal is to have a physics-based, tools approach that means everyone on the simulation sees environment changes in the same way and at the same time.

The need for this type of approach in simulation is increasing as gaming technologies become more prevalent in the training market, Graham said. “We have to change our simulations in this area so that simulation realism can continue to compete with gaming systems,” he said.

CAE expects this effort to be a three-year project and the company hopes to collaborate with partners who have data expertise in areas such as munitions effects and weather, Graham said. The project is an extension of CAE’s work on the Common Database, which it originally created for U.S. Special Operations Command.

The potential for this type of capability could go beyond mission rehearsal, Graham said, and prove useful to battlefield decision makers, who would have a persistently accurate synthetic environment of an area of interest from which they could model “what ifs” in real time.

— Karen Walker